The thing is Discord isn't finished with upsetting people - it still has to do a lot more stuff to get more net income for their IPO. How they will do that without seriously annoying users is hard to say. The more they annoy their users the more the users flee, boosting the value of the competition.
Discord does have some user capture, but nothing like twitter's - where followers & networks are valuable and can take a long time to aquire - and twitter's competition was able to scoop up a huge number of outraged users despite even that. Granted - I think Twitter's changes annoyed people much more than Discord's.
More importantly, Discord's communities are silo'ed, private by default, and administered and moderated by human beings with almost no oversight from Discord proper.
There is no equivalent on Twitter. On Reddit, going dark makes you subject to administrative subreddit takeover. But if someone runs a Discord community that they want to migrate to another platform, they could easily lock the entire server to posting and post a link to the alternative community. Done.
tl;dr Discord has a moat, but it's not very wide or deep.
Migrating all of that stuff to a new service (which may not even support it all) would be a huge pain.
I expect discords change will do the same.
I could see Discord going the same way - declining interest from users while they keep it around for the few 'essential' communities/friends on the platform, but very little tethering them to it if a disruptive competitor comes along.
It's clear age verification is coming from a changing legal environment around the world. Discord may be preemptively moving, but any competitor service is eventually going to have to age verify users before they access adult content.
Maybe but I just don't see this as a certain thing. The US may implement nation-wide age verification laws someday but it is a long ways from happening. Other discord-like software may be self-hosted by individuals, making enforcing age-verification difficult. There's nothing wrong with this. People would rather have a private place to chat as opposed to a place where your data will be observed by a big company and potentially sold or given to a hostile goverment.
There can be 2 things.
It can be fantastic for small players to get an influx of customers from a major player thats listing. Its good and healthy for the market.
That doesnt mean that Salesforce/Microsoft/Reddit/Discord is actually going anywhere. But these are still great numbers for the little guys.
>I'm rooting for any sort of truly solid decentralized chat
That would be great. I remember cryptocat was pretty good. But IIRC it died.
Digg, MySpace and Vine?